As someone in the Netherlands who has to use it and really doesn’t want to, I sure hope this motivates to Dutch to stop using this stupid app as the defacto texting platform.
That’s why I’ll defend vigorously the way we use SMS in the US.
Sure, it’s an outdated, insecure, bad system. Improvements like RCS are still iffy and poorly-rolled-out. But it’s also a standard you can use to connect with EVERYONE, isn’t controlled by a single private company (even if the evil fucks at Google desperately want it to be), and is totally interoperable between apps (since the apps are, after all, merely implementing a protocol).
I have high hopes the interoperability standards the EU is proposing will amount to something, but I won’t be holding my breath for it. In the meantime, I am not going to switch to whatever app is trending until it can at LEAST do everything I currently can with SMS.
WhatsApp claims to be E2E/not readable by Facebook and to my knowledge, all we have to the contrary is speculation provided you verify the keys on both ends (same as Signal). Facebook might know who you’re messaging but that’s also true for Signal. I’d still 100% trust Signal over WhatsApp given Facebook’s massive conflict of interest, but SMS has been known-bad and collected by the NSA for a decade now. US telecommunications companies also have a terrible reputation for privacy. The only advantage it has over any other platform is portability between providers but even that falls to the side since you can have multiple messaging apps at once.
As someone in the Netherlands who has to use it and really doesn’t want to, I sure hope this motivates to Dutch to stop using this stupid app as the defacto texting platform.
That’s why I’ll defend vigorously the way we use SMS in the US.
Sure, it’s an outdated, insecure, bad system. Improvements like RCS are still iffy and poorly-rolled-out. But it’s also a standard you can use to connect with EVERYONE, isn’t controlled by a single private company (even if the evil fucks at Google desperately want it to be), and is totally interoperable between apps (since the apps are, after all, merely implementing a protocol).
I have high hopes the interoperability standards the EU is proposing will amount to something, but I won’t be holding my breath for it. In the meantime, I am not going to switch to whatever app is trending until it can at LEAST do everything I currently can with SMS.
WhatsApp claims to be E2E/not readable by Facebook and to my knowledge, all we have to the contrary is speculation provided you verify the keys on both ends (same as Signal). Facebook might know who you’re messaging but that’s also true for Signal. I’d still 100% trust Signal over WhatsApp given Facebook’s massive conflict of interest, but SMS has been known-bad and collected by the NSA for a decade now. US telecommunications companies also have a terrible reputation for privacy. The only advantage it has over any other platform is portability between providers but even that falls to the side since you can have multiple messaging apps at once.